SpaceX notches major wins during tenth Starship test

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket lifted off on its tenth test flight Tuesday evening, hitting two long sought milestones and putting an end to a string of failures.

The 403-foot vehicle lifted off from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch facility and recently incorporated city, at 7:30 pm ET after two scrubs earlier in this week. The rocket ascended on 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines before separating around three minutes after liftoff.

On descent, the Super Heavy booster tested out a new maneuver: intentionally shutting down the engines used for landing and transitioning to backup engines. The test will help engineers understand how the Booster might perform in the case of failure. The test appeared to go as planned, with the 232-foot-tall booster successfully making a targeted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.  

Meanwhile, the upper stage, also called Starship, reached space. There, for the first time on a Starship flight, it opened its Pez-style payload door and released eight Starlink mass-simular satellites. This is a capability that SpaceX had planned, but failed to demonstrate on earlier missions. The company also successfully re-lit one of the Raptor engines in space before guiding the vehicle toward the Indian Ocean, where it splashed down, tipped over, and promptly exploded.

On the way down, the exterior of the Ship was exposed to incredible heat during atmospheric reentry, providing an excellent test environment for the upgraded thermal-protection system. SpaceX also used this test to try out a series of experiments, like removing tiles from sections of the Ship to see how its “skin” operates on reentry, plus a new metallic tile and an actively cooled tile.

Most importantly, however, is the upper stage completed the entire test and splashed down in the Indian Ocean without losing comms with SpaceX engineers. Durin the last flight, the Ship reached space and then lost attitude control during the coast phase, preventing the payload doors from opening. Engineers appear to have overcome those issues.

It’s a big win for SpaceX, which has repeatedly lost the Starship upper stage due to a series of technical failures during flight. The persistent issues have raised questions as to whether the rocket will be ready to land humans on the moon by mid-2027 for NASA, or when it will be capable of deploying next-gen Starlink satellites for the company.

This test marks a material advancement for the Starship program, which the company wants to eventually use to send humans and cargo to Mars. While SpaceX still has to complete a series of tough technical milestones before it can get there, it got one step closer tonight.